Awaken the Demon
by Deltree
Summary: Nobody is supposed to be able to come back from the dead, Jeanne's magic or not. And yet Ren did. Now something's awake and it is in no way pleased. HoroRen
1. Bad Dreams

Title: Awaken the Demon

Pairings: HoroRen, YohAnna RyuLyserg

Summary: Nobody is supposed to be able to come back from the dead, Jeanne's magic or not. And yet Ren did just that. Now something's awake and it is in no way pleased.

Warnings: Yaoi, graphic imagery, violence, implications of rape.

AN: I know I should definitely not be starting a new story with all the other stories I'm in the middle of, but I just couldn't help it. Honestly. Oh, and I'm kind of merging what happened in the manga with what happened in the anime. Just so you know.

Disclaimer: I don't own Shaman King or the characters.

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Chapter #1: Bad Dreams

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Ren felt strangely larger than himself. Almost as if he was taller, broader, not quite able to fully contain himself in a normal human body anymore. And why should he have to? Especially when human bodies were so very frail. Delicate almost.

Breakable.

Walking amongst the carnage of the streets, Ren looked around himself at the pain and suffering, corpses littering the sidewalks and screams of terror resounding through the air, and felt only a deep sense of _satisfaction_.

This. _This_ was how things were supposed to be.

Pain. Death. Destruction. Terror. Every dark fantasy rolled into one and then some.

And with him at the top of the heap. As it should be.

All those years _wasted_. Spent asleep and contained beyond the boundaries of the mortal plane. All thanks to those fucking useless shamans.

Well he'd showed them.

_A large man with a ridiculous pompadour screaming in agony as knife after knife entered his body, pinning him to the floor, blood running in rivulets from his mouth and wounds into the cracks in the concrete. Eyes begging desperately for escape, for release, as he is left in the abandoned warehouse to bleed to a slow death._

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_Brown hair matted to his head by blood still oozing from the gaping wound in his skull, brain matter and bits of bone splattered against the wall behind him, the normally dazed boy stares sightlessly into the distance. Far, far, too far gone for any help to reach him now. One blow had really been too merciful for that one._

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_Black eyes once filled with love now fill with horror and a deep, deep, betrayal, wrists and ankles bleeding from his useless attempts to escape the handcuffs, naked body baring both long, oozing, wounds from the knife and dark bruises from the beating. He had been shown his place and then broken. Bones snapped in one quick motion._

_-_

Ren smiled wickedly as he remembered, the memories flashing past his eyes. Oh yes, those had been fun.

He could still feel the satisfaction he had felt as he had first broken that stupid Ainu's spine to paralyze him from the waist down, then used him until the idiot was no longer fun and snapped his neck. Only the best death for the one who loved him after all.

Loved him. Ren laughed at the very thought. Love was such a stupid emotion.

Amusement at the concept staying with him for the next city block, Ren came to a gradual stop in front of a collapsed apartment building and frowned mildly at the wreckage. He could sense a single human soul trapped in there, most likely stuck under a fallen rafter with only the dead for company. The fire burning a few blocks down wouldn't reach this far into the city and the individual would probably survive the rest of the carnage by virtue of simply being stuck. Well he couldn't have that.

Picking his way through the rubble, Ren threw aside huge blocks of concrete with a careless ease, eventually uncovering a girl, maybe 13 at most, who looked up at him as if was God in human form. Considering the small form for a moment, a slow smile grew across Ren's face and he reached down to help the girl out. And she began to _scream_-------

Ren snapped awake with a gasp. Golden eyes wide, he stared at the canopy of his bed for a long moment as his breathing slowly settled back into a more normal rhythm.

Sitting up slowly, Ren carefully tried to push the imagery his mind had conjured up back to the recesses of his subconscious.

Another dream. That was what number out of how many?

And, fuck, but compared to the others that had actually been a good one. He'd only tortured a stranger and felt that awful satisfaction and remembered bare snippets of the torture of his friends. Other dreams had been focused solely on the torture and death and humiliations he had barely remembered in passing in that dream. Ryu's terrified and confused eyes as Ren personally cut out his tongue then shoved knife after knife into the man's body to pin him to the floor and _enjoyed_ every minute of it. Yoh's pleas to reconsider, to think about what he was doing, before Ren carelessly smashed a lead pipe into his closest friend's skull and laughed as the hard bone easily gave way.

Horohoro's _screams _as Ren . . . he couldn't even think it.

Ren had no idea what the _fuck_ was going on with his subconscious to inspire these kinds of nightmares, but he wanted it to stop. They were making him wonder what kind of person he was that he could even envision doing those terrible things. Even when he was younger and so jaded and wanted to destroy everyone and everything he'd never even once entertained the thought of torture or . . . that other thing. And he'd _definitely_ decided that he would never kill again. So what the hell was going on?

He'd been having these nightmares off and on ever since the Shaman Tournament had basically been forestalled, but then seemed to have increased in frequency in the past few months. Nothing seemed to have started them. He'd had no unusually traumatic occurrences happen in the three years since the tournament. In fact, his life had actually settled into a sort of boring routine. He, frankly, had absolutely no clue why the dreams continued to bother him.

There was, of course, that belief that any dream that repeated itself often was usually prophetic in some way. Ren really, seriously, did not want to even entertain that as an option. Because, if his dreams were prophetic, not only would he kill everyone he had ever cared about even slightly in passing, but he would also essentially bring about the true End of the World. Not a happy thought.

And what he did to _Horohoro_ . . . The boy was an idiot, but even he didn't deserve _that_. The torture Ren put the others through in his dreams was nothing compared to what he'd done to Horohoro. It hadn't even been just that thing. It had been so much worse.

And why his dream self kept referring to Horohoro as if he were an old lover was anybody's guess. Because while Ren admittedly liked the idiot a lot more than he logically should, and while he had long since realized that he was gay, Horohoro would just never be his type. Even if there was a strange sort of draw to those happy, carefree types.

Either way, Jun didn't and would never know about these nightmares. If she knew then she'd only want to inform somebody. Get him some sort of help. And Ren didn't need help from anybody. They were just dreams. Bad dreams, but just dreams.

That was all.

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"Master, a letter has come for you," one of the many nameless servants told him later that afternoon as Ren was passing through the entranceway with Jun. Stopping briefly to acknowledge the servant, Ren nodded and held out a hand. A letter was placed there and Ren glanced at it somewhat curiously. He typically didn't get a lot of mail. Usually, if any, it was from Yoh or occasionally Horohoro, both of whom he'd kept in contact with. Yoh because Ren kind of, sort of, liked the guy. Horohoro because the stupid Ainu had not allowed him to return to China without a promise to keep in touch and Ren had found the other boy's persistence strangely endearing instead of just plain annoying.

The two were likely his two closest friends nowadays because he was home schooled and really only had Bason, Jun, and Pailong for company. He didn't talk to the rest of his family, as they were strange and rather evil. His father had talked to the family ancestors and decided that the Taos needed to change their ways, but no one so far really seemed to be listening to him beyond giving up the contract killing and torturing. And they only did that because they absolutely had to under threat of death.

Ren really hated his family.

"Who's it from?" Jun asked curiously, trying to sneak a peek at the address.

Turning the envelope over in his hands, Ren read the scrawled Japanese return address. "It's from Yoh," he replied and quickly opened up the letter itself to read the contents.

Inside was a short letter, compared to Yoh's usual at least, and it basically boiled down to: Yoh's having a Shaman Tournament reunion and he wanted Ren to come. He told this to Jun and she just nodded.

"You should go," she said.

Ren looked at her. "I'm busy," he replied.

Jun looked vaguely amused. "No you're not. You can put off training for a few days. I think this would be good for you."

Ren looked dubious, but inwardly wondered if maybe his older sister knew more about his dreams than she let on. "Good for me," he simply repeated.

"Yes. Good for you." Jun frowned here, seeming as if she was undecided about saying something. "You've been acting really strangely lately," she finally said.

Ren frowned. He had been sure he'd been acting exactly the same as usual. He'd been almost neurotically careful about it. Then again, Jun had always been rather perceptive. "Strangely?" he asked as mildly as possible.

Jun nodded, looking vaguely worried as she thought about his apparent strange behavior. "Yeah," she said, "You snap at people for the littlest things and then can't remember anything about the incident minutes later. You stare off into nothing with this blank look on your face for ages before snapping back to the present as if you hadn't even paused. You haven't been sleeping. You're training even more than usual and you should _see_ yourself when you do your kata. It's like you're possessed." Now she looked at him, her worry clear on her face. "I've told you all this before."

Ren blinked. "You have?" He certainly never remembered that. He actually didn't remember _any_ of her examples except the not sleeping part.

"Yes!" Jun said with some obvious frustration. "You seem to just forget our conversations completely and that's just not like you."

Ren frowned and, looking down at the floor, had to agree. That wasn't like him. And Jun had never been a liar. At least not to him and especially not when it was serious. "You think I've been training too hard?" he asked just to make clear what she really thought. Ren, personally, didn't believe it was possible to train too hard or too much, but Jun wasn't quite of the same mind.

"You must be," she replied. "What other reason could there possibly be?"

Which was true. What other reason could there possibly be?

Still frowning at the floor, Ren thought about this. He actually really wouldn't mind going to the reunion. It would be nice to see Yoh again at the very least and if he went he could find out for certain if the Ainu's constant bragging about his new tricks was in any way earned. Ren looked back up at Jun who had been watching him with her own frown. "Would Father even allow it?"

"He does encourage your ties to Yoh," Jun answered. "Being close to a shaman as powerful as him is not a bad investment." She didn't say anything about the fact that their father actually seemed to like Yoh as a person. Logically they both knew their father had changed, that he was trying to be a better person and leader, but to them he was still the cruel man who had punished them and taught them to hate. It was a little difficult to really see their father as anything but, especially after the way he had treated them.

Letting all of that go unsaid, Ren conceded the point. "True." He thought for a second more then said, "Then I suppose I should go." He shot Jun a wry glance. "It's not like you would let me say otherwise, after all."

Jun smiled. "Too true."

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One week later Ren was boarding his family's private jet alone. Settling into his seat, he looked out the small plane window and tried to ignore the deep sense of foreboding that kept trying to get his attention. Something about this trip was playing hell with his instincts and he couldn't quite help the thought that maybe going to Japan was a huge, colossal mistake in the making.

Unable to figure out what the problem could possibly be though, Ren forcibly shoved these doubts to the back of his mind and focused on watching the clouds outside the window.

That was probably mistake number 2. He wouldn't discover mistake number 1 until it was far too late.

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TBC


	2. Funibari Onsen

Title: Awaken the Demon

Pairings: HoroRen, YohAnna RyuLyserg

Summary: Nobody is supposed to be able to come back from the dead, Jeanne's magic or not. And yet Ren did just that. Now something's awake and it is in no way pleased.

Warnings: Yaoi, graphic imagery, violence, implications of rape.

Disclaimer: I don't own Shaman King or the characters.

AN: I want to say thank you to the person who reviewed--AoiroFox, Thank you! It's nice to know somebody liked the first chapter and that it didn't completely suck. I just hope this one doesn't suck too. I like it though so I think it'll be okay even if it isn't very angsty yet. But the angst will come.

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Chapter #2: Funibari Onsen

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Horohoro bounded up to the door of the Funibari Onsen with a wide grin, duffel bag thrown casually over one shoulder. Ever since he had received his invitation he'd been excited about this reunion. He seriously couldn't wait to see everybody again. It had been way too long. Plus coming here had gotten him away from both Pilika's training regime and his parents all in one clean, legitimate swoop. For one week, he was free!

Grounding to a halt at the door before he could run into it, Horohoro tried to be mature and forced himself to calmly knock, but couldn't quite keep himself from a small, excited bounce. It took a second, but soon Ryu was opening the door and Horohoro felt his grin growing again.

"Dude! Hey!" he greeted enthusiastically.

Ryu, now twenty and looking it even if he did still have that ridiculous hairdo, smiled back and let him in. Seemed like the years may have finally matured the guy.

"Is Yoh in?" Horohoro asked as he followed behind the older man.

"The Chief's in the living room," Ryu answered, "but the Mistress told me to show you to your room before you get distracted."

That sounded okay so Horohoro nodded and kept following Ryu past the public areas of the Onsen and towards the back rooms. "Who else is here?" he asked curiously, wondering just who else had decided to come. He'd admittedly gotten there rather late, but he'd had to hitchhike down from Hokkaido alone again so he felt he was excused.

"Mostly everyone," Ryu said casually as they continued deeper into the Onsen, "Chocolove got here two days ago and Ren arrived last night." Of course then whatever maturity Ryu may have gained in the past three years went right out the window as the older man smiled, his expression melting into something sappy and really rather stupid looking as he continued, "Lyserg's been here for almost seven hours. He's even lovelier than he used to be!"

Amused, Horohoro shook his head. He'd never understood Ryu's crush on the British boy, but apparently it had lasted for the three years since Horohoro had last seen the two. It must be True Love.

Horohoro couldn't even think that without snickering.

"Here's your room," Ryu said, seeming to snap out of his lovesick daze long enough to indicate said room.

"Thanks, man." But then Horohoro looked back at the older man with a smirk and added with a somewhat sarcastic grace, "You can go back to Lyserg now. I'll see you in a bit."

"Thank you!" Ryu said enthusiastically and hurried off. Apparently he'd wanted to do that since the start.

Horohoro laughed again and then turned to his room, taking a second to take Kororo's tablet out of his duffel bag as he did so. Tablet in hand, he threw his bag into the corner of the room, content to indulge in some healthy procrastination in order to go find the others sooner. He could unpack later.

Tapping the tablet lightly, Horohoro called for his spirit friend. "Kororo?"

Materializing before him almost immediately, Kororo looked at him with a smile. "Kororo?" the little spirit asked.

Horohoro grinned back. "Yeah. We're here. Wanna go meet the guys again?"

"Roro!" Kororo answered and began to fly off only to pause at the door to see if he was coming.

Horohoro grinned again at the little spirit's obvious excitement and obligingly followed Kororo out the door. Arriving at the living room with little difficulty, Horohoro walked casually into the room and was about to call out a cheery greeting to everyone there when he happened to notice the boy leaning casually against the wall and felt all words leave him completely. Unable to stop himself from staring, Horohoro absently noticed that he had had the presence of mind to close his open mouth as his eyes went up and down the slim form. Was that Ren? He looked . . . good. More than good even.

In the three years since Horohoro had last seen him, Ren had apparently grown up some. All lean muscle and pale skin, all of it almost on display as the Chinese boy hadn't apparently grown out of his tendency toward rather revealing clothing (thank you, thank you, thank you, Horohoro's mind gibbered), Ren had gained at least a foot in height, but had kept the rather distinctive hairstyle and deceptively delicate air. And then Ren looked up, their eyes caught, and Horohoro was left trying to remember if the other boy's features had always been so fine or his eyes always so gold.

"Oh. You," Ren said blandly and Horohoro noticed absently that his voice had actually deepened. The other half of his concentration went into forming a coherent response and kicking his brain back into higher gear.

Succeeding somewhat, Horohoro found himself inexplicably walking over to the other boy as he put on a fake pout. Distantly, he noticed that Kororo had left him, finding her way over to the corner where all of the other spirits seemed to have gathered. "Yeah," he said, not paying his spirit's disappearance any mind. "Me. Didn't you miss me?"

"Like a brain tumor," Ren responded in that same bland voice. And wow. Horohoro hadn't thought it possible, but he had actually missed being insulted by this guy. The insults just weren't the same when written down on paper and not delivered in that low voice. Maybe there was something inherently wrong with him?

But Horohoro would worry about his apparent mental issues later. "Are you sure?" he asked as he came even closer. Clasping his hands cutely in front of his chin and putting on his most lovesick expression, eyes going large and dewy, Horohoro spoke in the sappiest voice he could muster as he leaned further into Ren's personal space. "Because I missed yoooouu."

Flinching away from him, a slight blush grew across Ren's face as the Chinese boy pushed him away and stuttered out an angry, "I – idiot."

Horohoro laughed and allowed himself to be pushed back. Smiling down at the smaller boy, he let the joke pass and said, "No, but seriously. How are you? You look good."

Ren smirked, some of that old arrogance shining through. "Of course I do. I always look good. You on the other hand." Ren looked him over, clearly unimpressed.

Horohoro snorted and rolled his eyes. Yep, that was Ren. Eye-candy now or not, he was still an asshole. "Hey. I don't care what you say. I know I look good." And he did. He'd certainly been told it often enough by random admirers. He was tall and lean, in great shape with great skin and good features and that's really all that people wanted nowadays. "Besides," he continued jokingly, "I was just being polite. You really look horrible. I think I see some flab on your stomach there. Might want to watch that." Horohoro poked a teasing finger at Ren's perfectly toned midsection, expecting his hand to be knocked away before he could even touch skin. When it wasn't Horohoro looked up at Ren's face with a mild frown to find Ren staring blankly at some point on the far side of the room. Looking over to see what Ren was staring at, Horohoro found nothing at all interesting that could have captured Ren's attention.

"Ren?" he called, trying to get his friend's attention as he waved a hand in front of Ren's face. Normally this would have gotten him an angry snarl and a swift swipe at his hand, but this time nothing happened. Strange.

"Ren?" he tried again, waving a hand even closer to Ren's nose, and when that was again ignored Horohoro started to feel a bit uneasy. "Hey! Ren!" he tried louder. And, with a long, slow blink, Ren finally seemed to come out of his daze, shaking his head gently and looking around his surroundings as if he had no idea where he was. Horohoro had never seen him so unguarded.

"Ren?" he tried cautiously and Ren finally turned his attention back to him with a frown.

"What?" he asked.

"Are you okay?" Horohoro asked, still cautious of the stinging reprimand he knew was coming.

And if he was waiting for the backlash of his concern he wasn't disappointed. Obviously irritated, Ren scowled. "Of _course_, I'm okay, you idiot. Why wouldn't I be?"

"It's just . . ." Horohoro said as he leaned back to study Ren's face, deliberately ignoring the insult. "I've never seen you zone out like that before."

And that only seemed to irritate Ren even further. "What are you talking about? I don't "zone out". Only empty-headed morons like you zone out."

This time Horohoro did twitch at being called both empty-headed and a moron in the same breath. "Then what are you calling what you just did?" Horohoro responded somewhat irritably, his slight unease beginning to disappear in the face of Ren acting so Ren-like again.

Scowling darkly, Ren narrowed his eyes at Horohoro furiously, but there seemed to be some confusion in there as well. Interesting. "I have no idea what you're talking about. Go annoy someone else already."

"Well alright," Horohoro said easily, more than willing to just brush the bit of strangeness aside and go talk to somebody in a better mood. "I think I'll go talk to Yoh then. See ya!" And with that Horohoro gave Ren one last cheery wave and was off to hunt down the host of the party. There seemed to be a cluster of people forming in the middle of the room and Horohoro would bet his left foot that that was where Yoh was seated.

He wasn't wrong.

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This whole reunion thing was turning out to be even more irritating than Ren had expected it to be. Everybody was so happy to see him and didn't seem to care that all Ren really wanted was to be left alone. Why had he come again? Jun had told him again and again that he was training too hard and needed a break, which he hadn't understood at all. How was he training too hard? But despite the fact that Ren had clearly decided, and even needed, to know what had made Jun think he needed a break, he still never seemed to ask her. And then the week had passed and he was on the plane with a heavy sense of foreboding persistently hanging over his head.

Nearly a day later, he was here, in Japan again, watching all of his old friends mingle and chat and laugh, not a single care on any of their faces for once. Normally he would be content with this, even if it did break into his training time, but now . . .

He looked at them and he saw their faces as they were in his nightmares. The pain and horror and fear and desperate pleading as they attempted to reach a sense of compassion in him that could never be found. It was somewhat . . . disturbing to say the least to have the two images—one of now/reality and the other of then/dreams—overlap.

But he could easily push that aside. What was really bugging him was the way everybody kept asking him if he was okay. They claimed he kept "zoning out" on them, staring into space for long moments at a time for no particular reason. And he wasn't! Tao Ren had never "zoned out" in his life. That was a past time better left to the vacuous and lazy, both of which Ren wasn't.

And then Ryu, the idiot, had claimed Ren had completely bitten Lyserg's head off for taking the last of the rice at dinner. And Ren hadn't! He didn't remember that at all, but the whole table had backed Ryu up, saying they had clearly seen and heard him do it. But Ren had never in his life ever cared enough about food, especially about plain white rice, the most boring foodstuff known to man, to ever snap into the rage the other's had described just because somebody had beaten him to it. It just didn't make sense. It couldn't have happened and there was no reason he should have forgotten about it even if it had.

"Hey!" came Horohoro's voice, "So this is where you've run off to."

Seated cross-legged on the grass of the local cemetery, Ren blinked up at the night sky. What had he been thinking about? Oh. Right. He was irritated because everybody kept getting into his personal space and personal business. Didn't they know to leave well enough alone? If he wanted to share his life story he would.

"Hey," Horohoro said again as the other boy dropped into the space beside Ren on the grass. Tilting his head, he looked at Ren curiously. "Well you sure got out of there fast," he commented mildly, not quite hiding his clear amusement with Ren's escape.

Ren glanced at him, taking in the Ainu's stupidly handsome features—who had let that idiot grow to be that good-looking again?—but then looked back up at the stars as if he could care less that his private time had been interrupted. "They were bugging me."

"Well of course they were," Horohoro said, some mild censure now coloring his voice. "They're concerned. You did pretty much explode in there for no reason. And then you pretended you didn't even do it! You've either changed a lot in the last three years or you've gone completely _insane_. I know which one I'm voting for."

Ren blinked again at the stars and mentally rewound the tape as if that would give him any idea as to what the hell Horohoro was talking about.

Horohoro didn't seem to notice Ren's blank confusion as he just continued. "They were gonna send Yoh out here for you because they figured he'd probably be the best one to get you to talk, but Anna's being Anna and refusing to let him out of the house. Apparently Yoh did something stupid before we all got here and Anna's keeping him on a tight leash." Horohoro snorted. "She probably just didn't want him to get to the graveyard and get distracted. Or something. I don't pretend to know what's going on in that girl's mind. I wouldn't want to. Geez." Horohoro visibly shook himself to get himself back on topic. "But anyways. So they sent me out here in place of Yoh. Don't really know why as you're probably not gonna talk to me, but, well, who _else_ are they gonna send? Ryu?" Horohoro seemed to laugh at the very thought.

And Ren understood all that. He did. But he had one question. "Horo?"

Horohoro seemed to remember where he was again and turned back to Ren. "Yeah?"

"Why are you here?" Ren asked point blank.

Horohoro blinked. "I thought I said. You're acting weird so people are worried."

Ren frowned, brows lowering in confusion as he stared at the Ainu. "What are you talking about?"

Horohoro blinked again, seeming confused by the question. "Um. You know. Your zoning out. Your complete freak out at dinner over _rice_ of all things. Remember?"

"Don't be an even bigger idiot than you usually are," Ren said scornfully. "That never happened and I don't "zone out"."

Horohoro frowned and tilted his head again, seeming to be considering Ren as if he were something strange and bizarre never before seen in nature. "You're doing it again."

"Doing _what_?" Ren asked with a dark glare, starting to lose his patience with this conversation.

"Pretending you don't remember," Horohoro said simply.

"And just what am I supposed to be remembering?" Ren asked furiously. When was this idiot going to get to the point?

Hororhoro frowned again, seeming to be getting a little irritated himself. "I just told you. Your little freak out. Your new zoning habit."

Ren blinked and took a mental step back, completely confused. "What are you talking about?"

Now Horohoro was starting to get really frustrated. "I just _told you_. Remember? It happened at dinner."

"What happened at dinner?" Ren asked blankly.

"You freaked out," Horohoro said bluntly. "You bit Lyserg's head off over _rice_."

Ren frowned and tried to remember that happening. He couldn't do it. "No, I didn't," he said. Because he hadn't.

"_Yes_," Horohoro said, obviously more than frustrated now. "Yes, you did."

"No," Ren said slowly, as if talking to an idiot. "No, I didn't. I think I would remember something like that."

"Stop lying!" Horohoro cried, obviously unable to take it anymore. "You aren't even good at it! We _saw_ you, you idiot! You did it right in front of our faces!"

Not liking the insult, Ren's face darkened and he glared at the Ainu furiously. "I don't even know what you're talking about," he snarled.

"I'm talking about your freak out!" Horohoro yelled, now having gotten to his feet to better vent his frustrations. "The one at dinner! What the hell is wrong with you?!"

Ren followed Horohoro's example and got to his feet. He didn't want to be at a disadvantage even if he still had no idea what the hell Horohoro was blabbering on about. "Nothing happened at dinner," he stated as calmly as possible when all he wanted to do was punch the idiot square in the face for daring to speak to him like this.

"Then what the hell do you call what you did to Lyserg?" Horohoro asked angrily.

Ren scowled, his expression darkening even further in confusion. "What the fuck are you talking about?"

"I'm talking about the way you completely bit Lyserg's head off over _rice_!" Horohoro exclaimed. "He did nothing to you!"

"And I didn't do anything to him," Ren growled past clenched teeth.

"_Dammit_, Ren! Stop _lying_!" Horohoro screamed, clearly unable to take this anymore. Ren had no idea what had him so frustrated, but also really didn't like being called a liar. If Tao Ren was one thing it was not a liar.

"Say that again," Ren said coldly, menacingly, as he made a threatening step closer.

And Horohoro had never had the best self-preservation instincts to begin with, but when angry what little he did have clearly went right out the window because, upon hearing this, he leaned over to get right in Ren's face and repeated very clearly. "You're. Lying."

And that was when Ren attacked.

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TBC?


End file.
